5 Things in Tech You Missed This Week - 4/23/16

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?

1- Malware attacks are becoming more frequent and harder to fight

From
Information Week:
The frequency and severity of malware attacks has increased "dramatically" since 2011, according to an April 19 State of the Endpoint Report from the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by CounterTack, a company that provides endpoint detection and response technology for enterprises. Of the 694 US IT security practitioners surveyed, 56% reported that malware attacks in recent years have become "stealthier and more difficult to detect." While 43% of respondents told researchers that they had a strategy in place to deal with destructive malware in 2015, only 38% reported the same a year later.

Why this is important for your business:

If big companies are struggling to keep up with malware attacks, what about small businesses like yours and mine? Of course there's no 100% solution to stopping this problem, but this is yet even more evidence that investing in an IT specialist or firm who provides security services, along with the right software and training will go a long way to defending against this these kinds of attacks.

2 - The struggles to regulate drones continue.

This week, a drone
hit an airplane landing at London's Heathrow Airport, yet the FAA is still
going forward with a plan for allowing some commercial drones to fly at night. Meanwhile, a startup
has a plan to protect airports (and potentially avoid the Heathrow incident) by taking over drones in midair.

Why this is important for your business:

Drone technology will continue to expand and with it will come many risks. This presents great opportunities both for businesses (real estate firms, surveying, emergency services) and
tech firms looking for new ways to protect society against the dangers presented by drones.

3 - A UK Football club's website gets deleted, along with many others.

From the
BBC:
The website of Scottish League Cup winners Ross County was accidentally deleted, causing problems with selling tickets. The Premiership outfit uses web hosting firm 123-reg. The company, which hosts 1.7m sites in the UK, has said an error made during maintenance "effectively deleted" what was on some of its servers.

Another
report said that
"it was unclear how many of the 1.7 million sites hosted by the United Kingdom-based company were impacted by the error, which occurred during server maintenance, however the BBC reported the company said it was a "small proportion."

Why this is important for your business:

Sometimes it's not viruses or malware that causes problems but good old human error. For many of us, our website is a crucial part of our business and if it goes down we could go down. Talk to your website provider about how and where they backup your site and understand what steps would be taken if either a human or a rogue piece of software disables (or deletes!) your website.

4 - CVS invests in a company to bring mobile orders and store pickup to its retail stores.

From
TechCrunch:
To use the service customers can place items in their basket while shopping from their smartphone, then head over to their local retail location where the order is ready for pickup within an hour. There’s no additional fee for using this option, which benefits a range of customers, from busy professionals to moms with babies or small kids they don’t want to have to wrangle in the stores or even the mobility-impaired. Orders are sent to CVS staff inside the stores when placed through the mobile software running on a company-owned mobile device, and store employees then pick the items and fill customers’ bags. When they’ve finished, they mark the order as ready in the app, which alerts the user. And when the customer arrives, geo-location technology again alerts the staff who will bring the order out to the car.

Why this is important for your business:

Curbside pickup, mobile applicaions, same-day at home delivery--these are just a few of the ways that many retailers (and now CVS) are trying to add to the convenience of shopping at their stores while creating a better shopping experience. What are you doing at your store to make the shopping experience as convenient as possible? Smaller merchants who ignore this trend will find themselves losing customers to the ones who don't.

5 - Not all the tech giants are doing so well.

Per
Forbes:
Reeling from a four-year decline in the PC market,
Intel said that it would cut 11% of its workforce — or about 12,000 employees. “If you look at the journey the company has been on for the last several years, we’re transitioning away from being at the heart of the PC market to a company at the heart of cloud and a lot of difference devices, which the PC is one,” said Intel chief financial officer Stacy Smith in an interview.

Per
Forbes:
SunEdison Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection. The erstwhile semiconductor manufacturer turned solar and wind power project developer, has been under siege for several months. Less than a year ago, SunEdison’s stock price had reached a record high of nearly $33 per share. The company had a total market value of $10 billion. Prior to its recent troubles, SunEdison had established itself as a solar industry pioneer, helping to introduce several innovative financing vehicles for solar, including the so-called YieldCo structure. A yield co is a publicly traded company formed to own assets that generated a predictable cash flow through long-term contracts, in the case of solar, power purchase agreements.

Why this is important for your business:

In a week where other tech giants like
Microsoft reported disappointing earnings, Intel and SunEdison's failures remind us of how fast things change in the technology world and how even some of the country biggest companies with the brightest people can make the wrong bets. How about you?